organic carbon accumulation and deposition. …
Placement of the boundary at or near the end of the
Mesozoic would require post-Flood time to be more
productive than the Flood at producing heavy oil and
tar sands. Any placement of the boundary other than
late in the Cainozoic requires post-flood catastrophes
and floods of enormous proportions.”
27

Micro-organism skeletal layers difficult to
accumulate post-Flood

Extensive, thick layers of micro-organism skeletons
are found in sedimentary rocks. The micro-organisms
include the calcium carbonate skeletons of coccolithophores
called coccoliths and the silica skeletons of diatoms. The
former deposit is called chalk and the latter is diatomite or
diatomaceous earth. These deposits are difficult for both
uniformitarian scientists and Flood geologists to explain, but
it seems like they would be even more difficult to explain
by post-Flood mass wasting. Since chalk is usually dated
as Cretaceous, below the K/T boundary, I will not discuss
it. However, nearly pure diatomite is found in the Tertiary.

Diatoms are unicellular algae, lacking flagella, and
have a skeleton of silicon dioxide (silica).
28 Living diatoms
are ubiquitous, inhabiting the oceans and a wide range of
freshwater habitats in abundance. Diatoms require light and
so live in the upper part of water bodies. As they die and
sink to the bottom, their skeletons pile up and the resulting
deposit is called diatomite. Today, they mostly collect on
the sea bottom below surface water that is cool, where they
mix with a lot of other sediments that dilute the purity of the
diatom deposit. The skeletons are also subject to dissolution
in deep water.

One of the most significant Tertiary deposits of diatomite
is the Miocene (early in the late Tertiary) deposit in the
Monterey Formation in west-central California that has
diatomite units up to 1,000 m thick.
29 Another layer is about
80 m thick in Peru within the Pisco Formation that is 200
to 1,000 m thick and dated as Miocene and Pliocene (late
Tertiary).
30

Just like with chalk, diatomite shows features that itwas deposited rapidly. Whereas present ocean deposits arediluted with other sediments, those in the geological recordare exceedingly pure, and therefore can be used in industrialprocesses.
31 Furthermore, there are also large fossils indiatomite that reinforce the conclusion that the depositswere buried rapidly. For instance, whales up to 25 m long arefound in the diatomite of the Monterey Formation.
32 Creationscientists from the Geoscience Research Institute, LomaLinda University, California, found 346 whale skeletonsin the Pisco Formation.
30, 33 These whales were so wellpreserved that even some soft tissues was found. Just likewith large organisms found in chalk, these well-preservedlarge vertebrates imply rapid burial because such largeanimals could not be preserved in the slow rain of diatomsto the ocean bottom observed today.

The uniformitarian model of slow accumulation of
diatomite over millions of years has major problems.
Huge blooms within the Flood potentially could account
for them, although specific details need to be researched,
similar to how Cretaceous chalk could have formed.
34
Can diatomaceous beds be explained by post-Flood
catastrophism, such huge mass-wasting events? Not knowing
of any specific models for these post-Flood catastrophes
limits comment on them. It seems like it would be difficult to
account for pure, thick Tertiary deposits of micro-organism
skeletons after the Flood by heavy precipitation events and
mass wasting.

Unique Cenozoic mammal fossil characteristics

Flood processes seem much better able to explain
several aspects of Tertiary mammal fossilization than
post-Flood mass wasting. For instance, if the Tertiary
was post-Flood, then there would be a huge lack of Flood
mammals, since there is a lack of fossilized mammals from
the Mesozoic. Then there is the problem of how Cenozoic
mammal graveyards would form. How would mass wasting
concentrate mammals into thin layers? And finally, how can
the Cenozoic mammal burial order be explained (if accepted
by those who believe in post-Flood catastrophism)?

Where are all the Flood mammals?

Mammal fossils are almost exclusively found in the
Cenozoic. There have been some mammals recently
discovered in the Mesozoic,
35 and they are not the shrewlike mammals but ones with special features such as hooves
and adaptions to digging, swimming, and burrowing.
35, 36
These instances are still a very small number compared to
those in Tertiary deposits.

If the Tertiary is a product of post-Flood mass wasting,
where are the pre-Flood mammals that died and were buried
in the Flood? The lack of mammals is unlikely in the Flood
that buried all land creatures that breathed air. Why would
the global catastrophe of the Flood bury very few mammals,
while post-Flood catastrophes buried tens of millions?

If the Tertiary is post-Flood, the Tertiary mammal fossils
found in the rocks would be a result of mammals spreading
across the earth after leaving the Ark. The mammals would
have to multiply dramatically and migrate globally, which
would probably take at least a few hundred years. Then,
they would have to be overwhelmed, buried, and fossilized
in gigantic post-Flood mass wasting events. This would also